The Hanging Tree (10 page)

“OK.” I put my hands in my pockets, made sure I still had the brush and the shoe. Not that I had any idea what use they would be.

“Sad thing, isn’t it?”

Johnny shrugged. I wondered, for just a second, if Gracie might have seduced him, just for kicks. Probably not, I decided.

“You didn’t see a cell phone around, did you?” he said.

“A cell phone? You have a cell phone?”

“Used to. She borrowed it.”

“She borrowed your cell phone?”

“For twenty dollars.”

“Oh. Well, no. Didn’t see it. Sorry.”

He looked around the room again. “I got to get back.”

I took a step closer to him. “Hey, Johnny, do me a favor, will you?” His face told me he wasn’t sure. “You know the expression ‘What goes on the road stays on the road’?”

“Nope.”

“Ha. Well, it’s a hockey thing. I was hoping maybe you’d kind of think of me coming here like that. One skater to another. I don’t want to get the cops pissed off. Especially when one of them’s my girlfriend, you know?”

“I’m not a skater anymore.”

“Just between us then?”

“Twenty bucks?” he said.

I gave him a ten and two fives. I was less worried about the sheriff finding out I was snooping beyond his police tape than I was about everyone else in town hearing it.

On the way back to town I dialed Darlene’s cell. It went immediately to voice mail. “Remind me,” I said. “Which shoe was Gracie missing?”

seven

My password opened Philo’s computer.

The techies hadn’t gotten around to disabling the override the
Pilot
’s previous owners had bestowed upon me as the boss of exactly three people. I supposed that they would get around to it, and then Philo probably would have the ability to pry into my e-mails. But for the moment, Media North’s organizational inertia was working in my favor. While my truck idled in the parking lot behind the newsroom, I scrolled through Philo’s e-mails. I wanted to confirm a hunch.

The subject line on a 9:14 a.m. e-mail read, “RE: hskl meetng.” I opened the e-mail.
Now is not the time to stand on principle,
I thought, remembering what Philo had said to me on the phone. I read the e-mail.

phi—

haskell & 1 other 11:15 his place

great opp here. No time 4 soap box.

jmk

“Figures,” I said to myself.

I closed up the computer and headed back out to my truck.

Only through the naked trees of winter could you see Laird Haskell’s home from the road. And, on this gray morning, Haskell himself, coatless on his porch.

After more than twenty-five years suing auto companies for building unsafe cars and trucks that killed and maimed and burned people, Haskell was a bona fide millionaire. He had lived in Bloomfield Hills near Detroit among many of the executives who appeared as defendants on his lawsuits. He had bought his house on Starvation as a weekend getaway in the mid-1970s
after seeing the lake when he’d come to watch his nephew’s Port Huron team play against the Rats.

Many years later, it turned out that his own son was quite a player. Minding the net for HoneyBaked Ham’s peewee team in Detroit, Taylor Haskell had let in, on average, fewer than two goals per game and registered an astonishing twenty-three shutouts in the fifty-six games he had played. But Laird Haskell was not satisfied, not with the coaching of his son, or with the players around his son, or with the fact that, every few games, HoneyBaked’s other goaltender would get a chance to play. He moved his boy to Little Caesars, then to Emmert Chevrolet. But nothing was good enough for Laird Haskell, who, like so many deluded hockey dads and moms, believed his son was destined for the NHL.

Haskell sold his Bloomfield Hills home and moved his son and wife to the palatial house on Starvation. They hadn’t been in town a month before Haskell appeared before the town council to say he had bought a thirty-acre parcel of land on which he planned to build the River Rats a new home, the Felicia Haskell IcePlex, with his own $7.5 million, all cash. He just needed a property tax break and a little help getting utilities hooked up.

I hadn’t seen him up close in years. Once in a while I’d glimpse him on the lake, shirtless at the wheel of his cruiser, or directing his help at his boathouse, which was about the size of Mom’s cottage. In Starvation he kept a low profile for a man who had made his name as one of the most effective plaintiff’s lawyers in the country, the scourge of Detroit’s automakers. He dispatched his attorney to most of the public meetings about the rink. Of course he showed up for every River Rats game to watch his son tend goal. But even there, he kept to himself; he had paid to have a small private box built in a high corner of the bleachers, where he served cocktails to men and women who came from places other than Starvation and vanished afterward, presumably to hotels or bed-and-breakfasts in the real resort towns, Charlevoix or Petoskey or Traverse City. Normally this would have been the source of much carping and gossip around the breakfast tables at Audrey’s, but no one dared to speak ill of Laird Haskell once he’d offered to build that rink with his own money.

He waved to me as I eased my truck down a steep winding path plowed to the bare concrete. Fake gas lamps glowed along both sides of the path.
Haskell ambled off the porch and stood waiting at the end of the drive. The house loomed up before me, three stories of cream siding, picture windows framed in maple, cantilevered decks someone had bothered to shovel. Plumes of smoke wafted up from a brick chimney. Even the firewood stacked neatly against the house had been swept clean of the night’s snow.

As I parked, Haskell approached, smiling. I wished he wouldn’t. The veneer of familiarity made me uncomfortable, even if we had in fact known each other for a good many years. He was grayer and thinner on top than I remembered, a small man, no bigger than me, who moved with the sureness of someone who had calmly accused chief executives to their faces of murdering the people who had died in their cars and trucks. His paunch nudged a little more firmly at his starched denim shirt, but Haskell was well kept for a man in his sixties. His smile, in particular, looked just as sculpted and willful as I’d seen it when he was beguiling juries and making himself wealthy.

I hopped out of my truck, automatically patting my back pocket for my notebook. Haskell stepped up and took my right hand into both of his.

“Long time, Gus,” he said. “I guess it really is true: you can run but you can’t hide.”

“You talking about me or you?”

He laughed and put an arm around my shoulders. “Let me show you my shack,” he said, as if I’d never written a single story calling the money behind his project into question, as if he’d never had his lawyer order me to stop calling the Haskell home at the dinner hour, as if we were old friends who’d bumped into each other at the country club.

The case was
Willing v. Superior Motors
. It was 1991 and I was covering the auto industry for the
Detroit
Times
.

Laird Haskell represented the estate of James P. Willing, a forty-one-year-old father of five who was killed when he ran his four-door sedan into the back of a panel truck on an interstate in southern Ohio. The lawsuit alleged that Willing’s antilock brakes had failed due to negligence on the part of the car’s manufacturer, Superior Motors.

At Haskell’s invitation, I appeared one morning at the thirty-fifth-floor offices of his firm in one of the glass-and-steel towers of the Renaissance Center on the Detroit River. A secretary led me to a conference room.
Four square white boxes marked
WILLING
were stacked against one wall. Six yellow legal pads and three blue felt-tipped pens waited at the seat where the secretary, a woman named Joyce, deposited me. Bottles of orange juice and Coke huddled on a silver tray. “Take all the time you need,” Joyce said. “Feel free to help yourself to a beverage. Sandwiches will be brought in later.”

“If I wanted to copy some pages, is there a—”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Haskell has directed that nothing be removed from the room, including copies. You may take notes, of course.”

“OK.”

“And,” she said, pausing at the door, “you were never here.”

I grinned. “Of course not.”

I spent the next five and a half hours going through the documents in the boxes. There were depositions, internal Superior Motors memos, various court pleadings. All told, the documents showed how the engineers at Superior had detected problems in the development of the company’s new antilock brake system. They had advocated design changes that, according to certain memos, would have cost Superior a few pennies per vehicle. A “safety economist” for the company had prepared a cost analysis estimating that the potential cost of litigation over the design of the brakes would be less than what it would cost to implement the changes. The analysis calculated the cost of a single human life at $432,124.68. The design changes were never made.

I ignored the stamps on the front of many of the documents saying they had been sealed by court order. That was Haskell’s problem, I figured. I had wanted to write about the Willing case for months, but the state judge overseeing the case had, at Superior’s request and over Haskell’s objections, blocked public access to all documents obtained in discovery between the company and the Willing family. So there wasn’t much to write about.

Until Haskell’s secretary phoned me one day and asked if I’d like to spend a few hours in a conference room with some boxes of paper. I readily agreed that anything I saw or read would be off the record until Haskell gave me the go-ahead to write my story. It was better than nothing, and I couldn’t imagine that Haskell wouldn’t want me to tell the world how Superior had behaved prior to the untimely death of a father of five.

I had eaten a turkey sandwich, gone through nearly three of the boxes,
and filled three legal pads with notes when Joyce came into the conference room around two thirty that afternoon and said I would have to leave because the conference room was needed. I was so excited about the prize-winning story I was already writing in my head that I never wondered why a firm with offices taking most of an entire floor in the Ren Cen didn’t have other conference rooms available.

“OK if I come back in the morning?” I said.

Joyce smiled politely. “Mr. Haskell will be in touch.”

I went back to the
Times
and told my editor to prepare a big display space in Sunday’s paper. We could start the story on A1 and open a page, maybe two, inside. I didn’t bother telling him that I couldn’t publish a word of it until Haskell gave me permission. I wasn’t worried in the least that he wouldn’t give it to me.

I began to worry a little when neither Joyce nor Haskell returned my calls the next day, or the day after that. Late that night, I got Haskell’s answering machine. “We plan to run this Sunday,” I said. “You’re going to love it.” Technically we weren’t supposed to tell sources when stories were running, especially stories that affected companies owned by public shareholders. But how could I get Haskell to release me to write without him knowing when? I didn’t think it could hurt.

On the Friday before the Sunday that my story was supposed to run, I received a phone call from a flack for Superior, an unctuous gnome of a man named Snell. I’d been trying to reach Haskell all morning, to no avail.

“I don’t get to say this very often,” Snell said. “But it’s a great day for American jurisprudence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I understand you’re working on a story.”

I could almost hear his smirk.

“I’m always working on stories, Dave. What’s up?”

“I don’t think you’re going to get to write that story.”

“Which story?”

He tittered. Then an echo came over his voice as he switched to a speakerphone. “I’ve got Howie Reichs with me.”

Howie Reichs was Superior’s top safety executive.

“Hello, Howard,” I said, knowing he hated being called Howard. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Augustus,” he said, imagining no doubt that I didn’t like being called Augustus. I actually didn’t mind. “I hate to disappoint you, but you’ll have to find another company to crucify this Sunday. “

How did he know it was Sunday? Only Haskell knew that.

“We’re going to be making an announcement shortly, and I wanted you to be the first to hear.”

I let my head drop into a hand. I knew what he was going to say.

Thirty minutes later, the company issued a two-paragraph statement: Superior had settled the Willing matter. The terms were not disclosed. The statement quoted Laird Haskell as saying the settlement “served the best interests of the Willing family while addressing the complex safety dilemmas posed by this admittedly complicated matter.”

My story never ran. The world did not find out about the design defects in the antilock brakes. But over the course of the next year, Haskell represented seven additional clients who sued Superior over the brakes. Each time, the cases were settled quickly and the terms were not disclosed. A story in the
American Lawyer
, quoting anonymous sources—Haskell, I guessed—estimated that the firm of Haskell, Sherman & Toddy had collected more than $20 million in contingency fees on the brakes cases. People kept dying, Haskell kept collecting, and my scribblings on those legal pads went unseen.

I called Haskell every day for months. Each day, Joyce would kindly tell me she’d give him my message; she may well have, but I never heard from him. I kept track of his firm’s cases, though. One morning I cornered him in a men’s room at the federal courthouse on Lafayette. He had just started to pee when I walked in and stood next to him at the adjacent urinal.

He turned and smiled at me, not the least bit surprised. “Hello, Gus,” he said. “We’re a little old for a sword fight, don’t you think?”

“I know what you did.”

“Really?” He peered into the urinal. “Then what are you doing here?”

I had come prepared. “You hear of the Miller family in Austin?”